A Windows 7 Professional question

[ThinkingManNeil]

Hi All;

Well, I've settled in after a 160 mile move across province from Durham Region to a picturesque little town on the shores of Lake Huron. I've got my PC set up where I want it - though now I've discovered my cat has been chewing again on the lead to my Wingman 3D joystick and rendered it inoperative - but that's not the issue I want to address. A couple of years ago when I was running Windows 7 Home Premium om my Dell Studio XPS rig (I now have a custom built machine running Windows 7 Professional) it suffered some sort of a crash late in its life (it was about five or six years old then). I was able to get it running, but for some reason it kept coming up with an error message about some kind of password validation failure whenever I tried to sign in to as the Administrator. The password hadn't changed, the system simply wouldn't recognize it anymore. I could still sign in as a Guest User with a password set aside for that, but with significant access restrictions that the guest account naturally comes with. So my question is this: is it possible to set up an alternative or even a "Master Password" as a back-up if the Administrator or Owner account passwords fail somehow or are not recognized by the system?

N.

[Jafo]

You can always have more than one account with 'Administrator' access, but if something causes a password to no longer be recognized then that can happen to any or all of them.
The solution then is to delete and reset password or passwords via third party means.
The one I have used in order to access/repair others' machines....

Boot off the Windows disk and select the “Repair your computer” option from the lower left-hand corner.

Follow through until you get to the option to open the Command Prompt, which you’ll want to select.

copy c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe c:\

copy c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe

Once you get to the login screen, hit the Shift key 5 times, and you’ll see an administrator mode command prompt.

Now to reset the password—just type the following command, replacing the username and password with the combination you want:

net user geek MyNewPassword

Of course, you’ll probably want to put the original sethc.exe file back, which you can do by rebooting into the installation CD, opening the command prompt, and copying the c:\sethc.exe file back to c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe.

Edit.... just to clarify....eg.... type net user Neil dontforgetthisone

[Dangerousdave26]

Here is another way to do it.

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php/79548-Computer-Question

[Dangerousdave26]

Make sure you read that whole post I referred to before you do anything. If I did not say it well enough in that thread do not change the password with that utility. Bad things happen when you do that.